Blur by Stylorouge
G-spot
“Perhaps the most consistent aspect of Blur's career has been the quality of their sleeve design. Suggestive, straightforward and eyecatching the sleeves are the work of a team from Stylorouge headed by Rob O'Connor. Already working with Food on artwork for Diesel Park West and Jesus Jones, O'Connor began working with Blur when they signed to the label. ‘The first step is to establish a visual dialogue with the band, combining your ideas with theirs whilst also working with the record company and the corporate record company (EMI),’ he explains. That helped to establish and maintain their image in an era when there is a profusion of single syllable groups. The sleeves themselves have a suggestive simplicity about them, often incorporating existing images, Mel Ramos' woman astride a hippo for 'She's so High.' But there is more to O'Connor's work then artistic piracy. ‘The implications are are important as the content, it's more attitude, less art... but not just voyeurism of secondhand images.’ However, irrelevant images are not the case with 'Leisure'. The smiling woman in the bathing cap is evidently pertinent to the title. ‘Record companies love head and shoulders shots of bands for sleeves, so we gave them a head and shoulders shot of a woman in a swimming cap. The picture was taken from a series of postcards presented to the bands in the early stages of the design process, they liked it and, combined with their logo, it became the sleeve.‘ This is a good example of what Rob calls ‘subcultural plundering’. O'Connor's attitude to the corporate constraints of sleeve design is one of co-operative irreverence, what he describes as ‘Cheeky cynicism’.”